The Hard Part
by Amaryllis Estyre
Summary: Explosions. Murders. Brain men. What are they but brief obstacles in the great path of a hero? Series of gen drabbles, ensemble.


**Title:** The Hard Part  
**Rating:** K  
**Characters/Pairings:** Ensemble. Mostly canon ships, if anything.  
**Spoilers:** … 1.21 "The Hard Part." Obviously.  
**Disclaimer:** I own nothing.

x x x

_I was sitting at my kitchen table watching The Hard Part on my laptop, and little snippets of drabbles kept popping into my head during various scenes. I jotted them all down, and I ended up with one from pretty much every scene. It's a great episode, that way. So I gave in and wrote all of them._

_Yeah, drabbles of varying lengths for every scene of the twenty-first episode of Heroes. It's really random. And I have no clue if it's any good or not. Why don't you review, and tell me?_

_Also, while you're at it, tell me if I did the Roman Numerals right. I like them, and I think I have the method down, but … they might be overkill, anyway. SHRUG I have no idea._

x x x

I.  
When it works, when he can just close his eyes and go anywhere, bend space and time like it's some insubstantial thing to be trifled with as much as he pleases, he can't help but feel like there's very little in the world capable of stopping him.

Explosions. Murders. Brain-men. What are they but brief obstacles in the great path of a hero?

II.  
She stays as quiet as she can, palm sweating against the banister. His wife is beautiful, so poised even when she is broken, and his kids, all rosy-cheeked and blue-eyed, the image of suburban perfection.

She has to wonder where she would fit into all this. It doesn't take her very long to come to the realization that she _wouldn't_.

III.  
The girl is brave, that isn't up for debate. She'd voluntarily taken a bullet, had her skin melted off, to save her surrogate family. She'd made a suicide leap not once, but twice, to gain the trust of a valued friend. She'd traveled across the country, plunged headfirst into a foreign world, just to find a man she barely knew. For God's sake, she'd crashed a car into a wall to teach a boy a lesson, only to drag him out of the burning wreckage because angry as she might have been, she still had a _heart_.

The things she's done. Who knows what she might do to protect her own uncle? Her own _father_?

No, there is no question. For the plan to work, she needs to be gone. There would be time for family bonding in the long years to come.

Still, a simple goodbye can't hurt.

IV.  
He doesn't know what they're talking about off by themselves, and he doesn't particularly care.

After all, he's only following them around because, for the moment, their paths happen to be traveling in the same direction. And he gets the feeling that once they get to New York, their paths might begin to significantly differ.

If they can't take out the Walker system, he'll make damn sure _he_ does, and he'll do whatever it takes to do it. He needs to show the people who ruined his life that the things that you do in this world have consequences.

He owes Karen that much.

V.  
He'd thought he had it all figured out.

He knew how things worked. He knew how _he_ worked. He knew what motivated him, what mattered to him, what made him do the things that he did. He knew the why behind everything, and yet -

If he was going to do this - this terrible thing, there had to be a reason.

What possible reason could there be?

What was going to _happen_ to him?

VI.  
Pick up the phone, and answer in a measured voice, even though it's obvious who it's going to be.

Gave him the number in case of an emergency. And he remembered. So flippant, so careless, so unaware -

But it could be anybody. So pick up the phone, and answer in a measured voice -

VII.  
He could've said anything.

There were a thousand words in his mind all at once, trying to force themselves out - _please, don't want, don't understand, need to, have to, why_ - but they didn't make any sense when he put them together, so he just said meaningless things until the inevitable happened.

He wouldn't have been able to help, anyway.

VIII.  
She watches her life through a pane of glass, watches another person miming her day-to-day actions. It makes her notice the absence of little idiosyncrasies that she always took for granted - the way she kisses Micah good-bye every morning before school, the way she sticks her toes out from under the blankets when she sleeps, the way she parts her hair a little bit to the side instead of straight down the middle - and she wonders if she was really so detached that, for so long, they don't even notice.

She tells her to help because she already butchered her life once and she wants another chance.

IX. She doesn't think it's a waste of her talent, not really.

The kid is adorable; she'd always wanted a couple of her own, back when she had nothing better to do with her life than to give it away to somebody else. He's at ease, only a little nervous now that his mother has promised everything's going to be okay, and they talk and play video games and laugh a little here and there.

It can't last, but whatever. An illusion of happiness is better than a reality of suffering. That's what's nice about making the world into whatever you want it to be.

X.  
Well, he's gone and underestimated a Suresh yet again.

Fortunately, he always has another card up his sleeve.

That's the fun thing about working for this Company. You never lose.

XI.  
You can only wear so many different masks before you begin to forget who's underneath.

He's afraid that there might be no one underneath any longer, that he might be all of the things Mohinder said and more, just an empty, hollow parasite, feeding off the lives of other people.

He goes home because if anyone knows who he is, it's her.

XII.  
When you go and meddle in time, things are supposed to change. That's just how it _works_. The hero goes back (or forward, as the case may be), fiddles with things, and everything is better.

That's how it always is in the stories, and, after all, life is a comic book. He's living proof.

XIII.  
He's standing here beside his wife that he doesn't know, staring at proof he doesn't understand, trying to wrap his mind around something he can't comprehend.

Everything had finally been working out, for him. With the way his life usually went, he should have stopped to wonder why.

XIV.  
Doctors were cold, logical men, always asking questions, always wanting to fix her, if only to prove that they were smarter than all the other doctors who had failed.

He _was_ different. He was _nice_.

She grins a little to herself, finds a little scrap of paper and a yellow crayon.

XV.  
He had dreamed what he had dreamed for a reason.

Nathan had looked straight into his eyes, just like he wasn't, right now, and he had _told_ him that everything was going to be fine, that he wasn't going to let this happen.

If he can't trust Nathan, who in this world _can_ he trust?

XVI.  
She can't believe that he's back again. She can't believe that anyone would give up the sort of life that he has made for himself to come home to this awful dump and put other peoples' watches back together. He's been given this gift of a better existence than she could ever have dreamed of, and he's back, frittering it away on trinkets.

But somewhere, locked away in some deep, secret part of her heart of hearts, she doesn't mind. Not really.

XVII.  
It seems like everywhere she goes, every family she finds, nothing ever quite adds up.

XVIII.  
How is he supposed to react to something like this? No one ever told him 'this is what you do when you discover that every door you run through leads to the same room, and your mother isn't really your mother, not anymore.'

What else isn't real? What else is just a big fat lie?

XIX.  
Enough is enough. He's damn special, and he doesn't need to be an investment banker to prove it.

The look in her eyes - first it's shock, terror, then a strange, childish sort of wonder, perfect delight in the miracle – the kind of thing she's only read about in old, leatherbound books – gracing her very own living room. He wonders if he's ever seen her like this before in his life, so transported with happiness, and all because of her silly, four-eyed son. All because of this _power_.

And then she's crying, blood flowing from a cut in her cheek, running from him like he's some monster borne of a child's bedtime story, and - well, isn't that just perfect?

Who did he think he was kidding? He couldn't fix anything.

XX.  
One look at that picture, and it all starts to make sense.

All thoughts of - of anyone else - leave his mind, and he sets about doing the necessary tests with a smile on his face.

Perhaps he doesn't need to save the entire world, not all at once. Maybe, for now, saving this precious little girl is penitence enough.

XXI..  
That man looks familiar, standing there by himself, the picture of desperation, trying in vain to gain some kind of approval, needing nothing more than for someone to look him straight in the eye and say 'yes, you are important, yes, you matter.'

He looks familiar because mere months ago, there had been another just like him, halfway across the world.

The circumstances we are given and the choices we make determine our impact on the world - whether we change it for better or for worse. Sometimes you are lucky, sometimes you are not. Sometimes you take what you are given, and you are strong, and you better the lives of others. Sometimes you do what this man has done.

Sometimes you have to face the consequences of your choices, whatever they might have been.

XXII.  
He could've said anything.

He could have held her arms at her sides, reasoned with her, _told_ her who he was, and she would have believed him, of course she would have, she _loved_ him, and none of this - none of this -

But all he could say was please, please, please.

XXIII.  
He wonders what his father would say, if the old man were looking at him right now, and the smiling face of the girl whose life he's saving.

And he wonders who it is that's doing the saving here, exactly, the dead man or the living man threatening to become him, but he realizes that when compared with the knowledge that this little girl is going to get another chance at life, the answer doesn't particularly matter.

XXIV.  
There are billions and billions of people in the world, and he is pretty sure that there are quite a few that are braver than he, himself, is.

But none of them are braver than the man standing right in front of him.

Yeah, they're homogenous. They're yogurt. But sometimes you want to spice things up, you add something to your yogurt. Berries, maybe.

The world, he decides, sometimes needs its berries.

XXV.  
She's traveled from her home where she knew everything to a place where she knows nothing, immersed herself in this sick, twisted political sideshow, only to discover that the one person on the entire globe she thought might understand has some insane death wish he wants her to help out with.

She doesn't know why she takes the gun. Maybe she still has some shred of hope that this might work out in the end, that she might salvage some scrap of normalcy from this mess of the entirely strange.

XXVI.  
For some reason, at the end of the day, everything seems to fall on his shoulders.

He is the one that is supposed to make sure it all works, it all fits together, and he isn't even a _part_ of this. This isn't his impossible dream, this isn't his legacy. His participation in this mad scheme is a right of birth, a responsibility, an obligation.

Why? Why is it always left up to _him_?

XXVII.  
The future is a terrifying place to let one's mind play. Every choice, every seemingly trivial decision, every movement made by every human being throughout the course of time makes little details, little moments so different from the way they might be, and no one has any idea.

He pieces through each option, each twist that fate has in store for him, and he analyzes, computes. He sees infinite futures stretching out before him, all different, yet all fundamentally the same. He chooses one he likes, sees each step taken to get there, and it clicks.

The universe has a funny way of working it all out in the long run.

He can't help it. He smiles.

XXVIII.  
He's an empath, there's no question, and seeing her tears makes him want to solve this all the more because then maybe her life _will_ be normal, as normal as it could possibly be. He's watching her sitting there, tears streaming down her face just because _she can't be like everybody else_, and all he wants to do is find some way to promise her that everything's going to be all right, that all she loves is going to be safe.

Instead, he just brushes her tears away, because if he told her that, he would be a liar.


End file.
